


All the Real Boys

by night_reveals



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Ficlet, M/M, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-20
Updated: 2011-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-27 14:12:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/night_reveals/pseuds/night_reveals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames was born without a heartbeat. He's never had one and he never will.</p><p>It turns out the only thing worse than true mortality is forced mortality.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Real Boys

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beanarie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/gifts).



> Fic for [JM](http://beanarie.livejournal.com/) for her prompt _I think I need a new heart_. This got a little longer than ficlet length.
> 
> Beta'ed by the wonderful [Rena](http://eternalsojourn.livejournal.com/).
> 
> **I have chosen not to use the major archive warnings for this story; please see the tags for content notes.**

 

“You’re not supposed to have anniversaries with them.” Ariadne looks over her shoulder at Arthur as she goes up on tip-toes and shoves a box of computer parts onto the shelf above her head. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“Maybe I’ll upgrade next cycle,” says Arthur, but even to his own ears it sounds slightly desperate, like he can feel his fingers slowly being pried from whatever ledge they’ve held onto so far. She’s not the first person to say this to him. “You guys’re coming out with a completely new chip system in spring, and I can replace then.”

“What, to save money?” Ariadne asks skeptically. “I’ve seen you and Robert’s offices. You’re making a ton off that dream drug.”

Arthur grits his teeth. “It’s not ‘a drug’; it uses a drug,” he says, knowing his words are falling on deaf ears.

“Technicalities,” dismisses Ariadne, turning at last to give Arthur her full attention. “In any case, you know I’m a project manager on the Hume IV. It’s coming to market in November for the holidays. Testing has already ended.”

November, only a month away. That’s exactly the year mark -- the end of the cycle. Arthur blanches.

“Arthur,” says Ariadne, voice as soft as it’s been in a while. “We cycle all of our AI units every year for good reasons. You know this has become unhealthy.”

“It is not.” Arthur grabs his coat from where it’s strewn over a shiny metal table. “It’s not unhealthy. You just refuse to understand.”

“You wanted me to say I could help you, but I can’t,” says Ariadne, mouth straight and thin. “It’s because I’m your friend that I’m saying no. I’m worried -- ”

“Oh fuck’s sake, listen to yourself.” Arthur can’t help turning to face her again, her words catching at something inside him -- perhaps the truth. He _has_ neglected his friends and his family, but he’s never felt like this before. He knows whatever she says next will leave him no hope to survive on; he’d saved her for last but she’s failing him, too.

“You listen to yourself! You want me to fiddle with it and I won’t. You’ve fucking disappeared off the face of the planet, Arthur, spending time with it and thinking that what you have with it is -- is real. It’s not real. I can’t lie to the government, or the company, for you. You’ll have a follow up appointment the week before, same as everyone.”

Arthur wants to say something like, ‘That’s all I needed to hear’, or ‘this is how you repay me.’ Something to get across the burning in his chest, that’s slowly migrating from his lungs to his throat to his eyes. Instead he turns and walks to the door. He doesn’t bother with his coat, though there’s a dusting of snow on the ground.

“See you soon,” calls Ariadne from behind him. She sounds sad.

~*~

After he’s swiped his finger over the biolock to open his car, he looks one last time at the soaring glass giant of a building before him, where somewhere inside Ariadne and hundreds of other scientists tinker all day. _Hume Research and Development: AI Division_ reads the front sign, a laser-cut slab of marble big enough to crush a man.

Arthur presses his hands to his face, and tries to breathe.

~*~

When Arthur walks in the door, Eames is at the piano. It’s an old, battered thing that warbles like an ageing opera singer, and Arthur had never played it after his last lesson as a teenager. Eames somehow tuned it and taught himself to play, though, downloading all the classics and mastering them one at a time. Logically, Eames shouldn’t have the dexterity to play Prokofiev; he’s an expensive trinket made to sit in the homes of the rich and answer questions with alacrity and humor. Logically, Eames’ hands shouldn’t be able to do a lot of things they do (paint the walls, make coffee, steal Arthur’s breath), but somehow they manage.

Arthur wipes at his red, running nose.

“Gummed up, are you?” Eames is turned, looking up at Arthur from where he’s seated. “Come here, then.”

A second later Arthur is next to Eames on the bench, angrily blowing into a tissue that Eames handed him. He throws it in a tiny trashcan, and Eames takes his hand as soon as it’s free.

“Gross.” Arthur tries to slip his hand out, but Eames tightens his hold.

“Not like I’ll get sick,” he points out.

Arthur looks down at the once white keys, now a bruise-like yellow from age. Sick, no. Eames will never get sick.

“Hands up.” Eames guides Arthur’s hands to the keys.

They play there for two hours, only stopping once for Eames to slip his finger into the wall socket for a burst of energy.

“Tired?” asks Eames after Arthur has bungled even more notes than usual.

“Yeah.”

Eames opens his mouth and a lullaby by an Irish woman comes out, an old recording from the aughts -- something about a moon and a fox.

“Not funny,” says Arthur coldly, rising from the bench and striding quickly to the bedroom. He pulls off his shirt and is unbuttoning his slacks when Eames walks in, hands in his pockets and gaze steady. He lounges against the door for a moment, watching as Arthur puts on his ratty sweatpants from college, folds his clothes and puts them in the dirty laundry basket, and washes his face.

“Are you going to stop watching me anytime soon?” Arthur looks at Eames’ reflection in the mirror, trying not to feel like he’s snapping -- but he is.

“If you want to distance yourself from me, attack all you want. The only way to really do it is to run away, and even then I’m rather sure I can find you.”

The anger that had been building in Arthur like a tide goes out swiftly, a backrush of a wave, collapsing in on itself before smoothing out. When Arthur turns, repentant, Eames is there, arms already around Arthur.

“She said no,” Arthur says, unnecessarily.

Eames sighs against Arthur’s head, and their bodies move together with it.

“I’m guessing she didn’t tell you how to hack the tracking so we could do it ourselves, either?”

“Didn’t want to even give her the idea that we already tried.”

“The off-world tickets you looked into?” Eames pulls back and looks at Arthur.

“Space One called this morning. They don’t sell without copies of all travelers’ vitals, and they test pre-flight.”

Eames closes his eyes and rests his head on Arthur’s shoulder, for once allowing Arthur to bear the full weight. It’s heavy -- at least four times heavier than a human’s -- but Arthur doesn’t mind. He cards a hand through Eames’ hair, scratching around his neck to make him hum. He knows how Eames feels (because he _does_ feel): like every door to the house of their life together has been slammed shut one-by-one with the countdown to Eames’ cycle-date. Once, when they’d had ideas about how to get around it, they’d morbidly called it his birthday. That had lost its humor months ago.

“Four weeks,” says Eames.

Arthur feels like throwing up.

~*~

The next week Arthur spends doing errands. He goes to the bank and finishes the paperwork he half-heartedly started years ago, laying out his will as best he can. He cleans the house up and down, every piece of lint gone. He gives the cat to his neighbor. His lawyer gets visits, as does his doctor at Central Medical. He writes a lot of old-fashioned letters, too, though they’re postmarked for later. One is to his mother in New York; one is to Ariadne. They both start with “I’m sorry.” Eames is annoyed. He tries not to show it, Arthur knows, but -- if this were truly almost the last week, Arthur would be annoyed with himself for wasting their time together, too. But it’s not.

“What are you doing?” Eames crosses his arms, looking down at where Arthur is on the couch fiddling with a metal contraption.

“It’s my work,” says Arthur, barely sparing a glance for Eames. He’ll see.

“I know it is your work, you barely shut-up about it sometimes. I’m asking you, what are you doing.” As if he’s reached some cut-off point, Eames reaches down and grabs Arthur’s hands, dragging them out from the guts of the PASIV. “Can’t you do work -- later?” Eames leaves the _when I’m gone_ unsaid.

“Sit?”

Eames does, doing the half-huff half-sigh he’s perfected.

“We’ve got to try it.” Arthur nods to the PASIV, his eyes bright. “I’ve modified it. Again.”

Eames frowns deeply, his mouth twisted. “It’ll fry me. No bloodstream, no dreams, no dice, remember?”

As if Arthur needed a reminder of that first month, when he’d treated Eames like something to experiment on.

“The man who tried to take out your chip last month sent me some information. Basic stuff, but I think I can connect the PASIV to your chip and cortex at the same time. Just -- trust me?” For the first time in a week, Arthur takes in Eames, really seeing every part of him. Supposedly behind his grey-blue eyes are retinal imaging systems; supposedly his cheeks are proto-plastine. Arthur’s never been able to see any of that, even when he looked for it.

“I think we should just take our weeks.” Eames isn’t looking at Arthur when he says it; his gaze is fixed to Arthur’s fingers threading through the wires and plastine innards of the PASIV.

Arthur throws himself back from his work, scared he’ll make a mistake in his growing frustration.

“So, you want me to just -- what? Let this happen to you?”

“No one’s letting anything happen,” Eames says, glaring. “We’ve tried everything, Arthur -- and let me tell you, going under to have that hack try to take out my chip was the most goddamn painful thing I’ve ever done. I’d do it again if there was even a sliver -- a sliver -- of a chance it’d work. But we’ve tried getting it out of me, getting us off-world, running to -- “

Arthur sits forward as suddenly as he’d thrown himself back.

“A lifetime, Eames,” he interrupts. “We could live a life, together.”

The words hit Eames’ face one by one, his face turning wretched and longing, just like Arthur feels inside, before it turns to sadness.

“It’s not, though,” says Eames, running his hot hand over Arthur’s knee. He’s always so warm, unnaturally so. It’s pleasant to feel, Eames’ life thrumming through to Arthur’s skin. “It’s fake.”

“People say that about us,” reminds Arthur. Before Eames can pull his hand away, Arthur puts his own over it. “How could it be fake, if we were both there?”

“You’d wake alone.” As if this is the hardest thing Eames has contemplated, he pulls Arthur towards him, as strangely strong as he is warm.

Arthur shrugs non-committedly, his shoulder rubbing Eames’ chest. It only takes a moment before Eames has connected the dots, putting together what Arthur hasn’t said. When he does, Arthur finds himself sprawled out across the couch, his shoulder smarting from where Eames pushed him away roughly.

“I can’t believe you’d even think -- ” starts Eames, standing over Arthur. His anger is tightly controlled, as always, gathering in the clench of one fist. “I don’t dream but I remember what you said that day about it.” Eames opens his mouth, showing his teeth and all.

“Don’t do it -- ” warns Arthur, his hand coming up as if he can stop Eames.

A tinny voice comes out of Eames’ wide open mouth, and it only takes Arthur a moment to place it as Eames’ voice -- it always sounds strange coming out when Eames’ lips aren’t moving.

_”What’s wrong?”_

There’s shuffling, some moving of papers. Arthur remembers how shaken up he’d been; he’d spilled tea over his calculations.

_“Nothing, I’m fine.”_

_“Tell me.”_

On the couch in the here and now, Arthur drops his head into his hands, knowing what’s coming next. Eames makes him listen to himself describe the final layer that he’d discovered while playing with the PASIV, the loneliness and the fear that he’d lost himself inside his own mind forever -- limbo. The recording becomes more muffled, and Arthur knows it’s because he was pressed right up against Eames’ neck when it was made, them whispering to each other.

The recording clicks off.

“‘m sorry.” Eames’ real voice is hoarse.

“The men who think their wives remember every little thing they say have nothing on me,” says Arthur, the words an old, favoured complaint. It gets a little quirk of Eames’ lips, before he’s sitting next to Arthur again, urging him to look up.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Eames says. “We’ll try. But when it’s done -- when they cycle me and I blink out of the dream -- you have to come back up.”

Arthur crosses his arms over his chest and doesn’t say anything.

“Like you said, we’d have a lifetime,” says Eames, pressing.

“You want me to keep your next cycle around?” asks Arthur, his voice as straight and wooden as the table they are sitting next to. “I could teach him to fuck, too. I’m already used to the body, after all.”

Eames ignores the jibes and soldiers on. “Why are you trying to couch it so prettily? Going into limbo is the same as dying. I saw the brain imaging from when you were in there. Another few hours real-time and you’d have been a bloody limp carrot. You can’t do that.”

“You don’t have a right to tell me what to do. You won’t even _be_ here.”

“Of course, I have no rights,” says Eames. “No right to travel, no right to expression, no right to work. At least those were all imposed. Now I don’t even have the right to care about you?”

Arthur drops his head, and feels the couch dip as Eames sits next to him and sighs. The ridiculous coconut clock that they bought in the Bahamas chimes, telling them it’s eleven at night.

“Why’re we fighting, again?”

“You’re being daft.”

Turning to Eames, Arthur taps his fingers on his knee and says, “Fine. Fine. It’s a deal.”

~*~

The knock at the door at promptly six in the evening does not surprise Arthur. It’s the first day of the last week; owners across the world are receiving calls like this. Eames is the one who greets her after Arthur opens the door. As she peels off her coat she looks between them hesitantly, caught out in her ignorance. The great incomprehension on her lined face seems to Arthur like the worst schadenfreude; that she cannot judge their humanity or lack thereof proves a hollow win. Once it had been a triumph to go to restaurants and have Eames taken as human. Here it is only as if Arthur's naïveté has finally been exposed.

They sit together after Eames offers her a seat and puts a guiding hand to Arthur’s straight back. This woman isn’t evil, Arthur knows. She believes that she’s providing a service. It doesn’t stop Arthur from refusing to offer her anything to drink, or from staring challengingly across their oak table. Her former hesitation turns quickly enough to defiance, and she meets Arthur’s gaze frankly over the dark wood as she speaks at length.

“Over the next week, your unit will begin to slow down. Speech capabilities, dexterity, and memory will deteriorate. It will retain basic functions until your cycle-date, at which point it will turn off for twelve hours or more. You should leave it plugged in through this time. After nine AM the day after your cycle-date, as noted in the literature provided when you first purchased your unit, it will re-boot and download upgrades. You will then have a new Hume. Some of our customers have expressed the wish to hand over their units until the upgrade is complete, to spare themselves the trouble of accommodating for an impaired device. Do you wish to do this?”

“No,” says Arthur, barely able to scrape the word out of himself. The woman recoils, dragging her bitten nails from the table as if wary it will crack beneath her from the sheer weight of his voice. Arthur notes the perspiration marks her hands leave on the wood with no satisfaction.

Her defiance so crumbled, Arthur sees her out. He shuts the door softly, almost guiltily.

~*~

The day that Eames wakes and reports a lagging in his body is the day that they decide to do it. It’s strange to see Eames lying on the floor, finger plugged into the wall and eyes closing and opening oh-so-slowly.

Arthur helps Eames hook himself in, undoing the small panel on his shoulder and screwing in what will be his line. Next, a sterile smell from the new needle that Arthur opens for himself fills the air. He slowly slips the needle into the purple line right above his elbow, securing it after. It’s a relatively ancient piece of medical equipment, but it’s the only thing that works with the PASIV. Blood races through Arthur’s veins; he doesn’t think he’s ever been so cognizant of it before now -- his heart beats once and he can feel the flow tingle through his body, his fingers and thighs and toes, his groin and his back. Across from him, Eames slowly smiles, and Arthur decides not to ask if he’s ready.

Two days before the cycle-date, they go to sleep.

 

 

~*~

 

 

Gasping, Arthur awakes. He tries to rise but his knees are rickety, his muscles shrunken from age -- he knocks over the huge glass of water he’d placed on the table next to them sixty years ago. No, two days ago.

He is old -- or he feels old, thirsty -- and there is pain when the needle tears out from his skin as he scoots on his knees towards where Eames is slumped over, still asleep. Hope fills Arthur for a second as he thinks that perhaps the cycle skipped Eames or that dreaming protected him. But then Arthur places a hand on Eames’ cold, bare arm; he sees the blank eyes of the Hume staring at him, and suddenly realizes that this is what others saw when they looked at Eames: something soulless.

The proto-plastine Arthur has never seen before is now all he can see.

He flinches away from the Hume’s slick, unreal body and lays on the floor next to it. Arthur has just enough water left inside of him to cry.

~*~

 **Plaintiff Awarded $920M in Case Against Intel’s Hume Co.; Wins Rights to Data**  
New York, New York  
January 23rd, 2053

In what may be a record-breaking settlement for a single plaintiff in a data-complaint case, the New York State Supreme Court on Tuesday awarded co-creator of the SIV-T dream network Arthur Tallow, 43 of New York, NY, 920 million dollars in compensation for mental duress and court costs, and in punitive damages.

Tallow originally sued Hume Co. in December 2043 for access to the records in which his former AI’s memory and information was stored. After maintaining for more than seven years that the records were destroyed during the cycling of Tallow’s AI, Hume Co. in September 2051 at last came forward with the data after a whistleblower and former employee of Hume Co. calling him or herself “The Architect” wrote a series of letters to _The New York Times_.

The decision brings one of the most infamous trials of the last decade to a decisive conclusion. The outcome, though expected by some after last year’s August ruling by the Supreme Court on the rights of certain AIs in Aboutalib vs. Pennsylvania, has been celebrated by assorted human and AI rights groups throughout the country. The ACLU submitted more than two dozen amicus curia briefs over the ten-year period that the case was in court, and was represented by Madeline Sutar outside the courthouse.

“The ACLU believes that today this court sent a very important and long-needed message to both the American people and the businesses trafficking in AI. With the facts as they stand, the practice of cycling will soon, we do believe rightly, become illegal in all fifty states.”

Both the data and money will become available to Tallow in one month’s time, the normal processing period for the New York State court.

Tallow could not be reached for comment.


End file.
